


Hiraeth

by sabrecmc



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fanart, M/M, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 09:11:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4516170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrecmc/pseuds/sabrecmc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Do you believe the universe fights for souls to be together?" Tony asked, trying to keep his voice steady and tell himself the answer wasn't everything.</p><p>Fanart by superfizz in Chapter 3</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally one of my Thank You Fics that I decided I couldn't leave as a drabble, because poor Tony. Geez.

It was impossible to miss something you never had. You could regret the lack, Tony supposed, but you could never really know what it felt like to have it, so you couldn’t exactly miss it. Maybe there was a blessing in that, the lack of knowledge. Like being born without an appendage. You missed the perceived ease that graced the lives of others, but you couldn’t miss the thing itself. You had no conception of a world where the phantom limb once made you whole.

He liked to think that, sometimes. Sometimes, it helped to think that. It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. It wasn’t truth, either, he could admit now. It was something in between. Grace, his mother would have said, and that might be the most apt description, because grace never came without pain or sacrifice, but that was what made it mean something.

Tony shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket and undid the small buttons at the cuffs of the crisply starched white shirt, then rolled up the sleeves, right hand rubbing over the titanium band that circled his left wrist. He caught his reflection in the three-paneled mirror above the bureau and ran light fingers up and down the center row of buttons, stopping briefly to tap on the hard plane of blue that shone through the white shirt.

Pain and sacrifice, he thought, sucking in a breath and feeling strangely grateful when it smelled lightly of sandalwood, something the maid thought he liked, and not the rank, vaguely stale air of a cave. Old air, he thought. He suspected his last breath would taste of old air, but that wasn’t something he shared with anyone. Certainly not today of all days.

Today was for celebrating, and he was happy for them, how could he not be? After all, what would it say about him if he weren’t , if a part of him hated them both a little, wanted to go back and change the past and take this away from them? What kind of person would he be if thought about that?

Well, it would probably say a lot, he thought viciously, scrubbing his face with his hand and turning away from the image in the mirror doing the same.

He wasn’t sure when he realized he was different. Wrong-different. When had his parents’ glances had gone from concerned to furtive to something that might have been pitying? If it had been pity, it had quickly become laced with something darker, maybe their own guilt slowly burning into penance, he couldn’t be sure. They’d done a damn good job making themselves unhappy, that much was certain, until his father spent more days trying to bury a ghost than raise a son.

He remembered always knowing not to talk about it. It wasn’t said explicitly, at least, not until much later, but he knew. He _knew_. Keep it hidden. Don’t tell. Don’t talk about, not ever, because if they know, if they know, it will be bad, wrong-bad, and they would know. They would know about him, and they would look at him the way his mother did, with her pinched face, sadness and horror and shame warring with guilt and usually losing. Winner gets a bottle of chardonnay, he thought, the memory, old as it was, still able to sting. She’d loved him, true, but she’d hated herself more, and that was something he could never forgive. He’d needed her, at least, to love him enough to lie to him.

He could still see the circus wallpaper border in the doctor’s office. It was an incredibly vivid memory, clear and precise, undimmed by the passing of decades. Some sort of line of demarcation, he supposed. There had been a blue train with a smiling face pulling grinning, brightly colored animals in puffy-barred cages behind it.  Sometimes, he could feel the sticky thin sheet of paper covering the faux leather exam table rubbing against the backs of his thighs while the doctor talked in low tones to his mother, patting her gently on the shoulder. Consoling, he knew now. He remembered the way the doctor had recoiled, drawing back and dropping Tony’s wrist as if it burned, before he regained some composure.

_“It should be there by now, right? I mean, I know some children are late-bloomers, but…it should be there, shouldn’t it, Doctor?” his mother’s voice pressed, high and shrill and already sure that something was terribly wrong._

Afterwards, he’d asked if they could go to the circus. She had promised they would. He’d wanted a balloon, red, like the one the clown in the wallpaper was holding, and maybe some cotton candy. Jarvis had taken him, eventually, the first of many half-fulfilled promises that he didn’t realize at the time were each a step away from him. He’d gotten that and so much more, anything he wanted, in fact, all given at a careful distance. They’d given him everything they could, too much, really. He could see it now, the way they tried to fill something he didn’t know was empty until years later.

Tony walked to the dark-paneled bar and poured a dark, amber liquid into one of the glasses. He lifted the cubed tumbler and took a long swallow, relishing the familiar burn as the alcohol ran down his throat and soured into his stomach. He rubbed absently at the titanium band that circled around his wrist, covering the smooth, unblemished skin there where his soulmark would be.

Should be.

He was being maudlin, he knew, though felt somewhat entitled at this point. He’d been the perfect gentleman all day. Hell, he’d even given a toast at the rehearsal dinner.

 _To the happy couple_ , he thought, hearing the edge of bitterness in the words as he raised the empty glass to the city skyline that glittered outside the window. The thing of it was, most of the time, he was genuinely thrilled for Pepper and Happy. They were perfect for each other. Of course they were. That was the point. Couldn’t have happened to two better people, and he loved them both. They were family, the best kind, the kind that you chose and chose you right back. It was easy to be happy for them. Hell, you could siphon off a bit of theirs and they’d never notice, too caught up in having found each other, won the universe’s great lottery and actually managed to meet.

Still, he could close his eyes and see Pepper’s face in that moment before she’d caught herself and shuttered her expression when he showed her his wrist. He’d wanted her to know, was all. Before they really committed to try something together. Unbonded couples were the norm, after all. Billions of people out there, so it wasn’t exactly a simple proposition to find that one person. He’d just felt that she should know before they went further. Honestly, a part of him had hoped she might find it reassuring, that he wasn’t going to one day find his soulmate and leave her. He hadn’t expected…well, he hadn’t expected to flash to red balloons. He’d gotten angry, and that hadn’t helped. She had been sorry, that much was clear, he just hadn’t been able to tell what she was sorry about, her reaction or the reason why. And that, really, had been the beginning of the end, Happy aside.

He hadn’t understood, of course he hadn’t, because it was the missing limb, the dark of blindness, the silence of deafness. The utter absence of knowledge of what it meant to have the certainty that Pepper and everyone else took as rote.  

For most of human history, soulmates had been the stuff of fairy tales anyway, drifting between legend and romanticized fantasy. Fuck, when you had a life expectancy of thirty or so years, it wasn’t like you could hold out for finding your soulmate. Matchmakers could supposedly help find someone compatible, or that was how they billed it anyway, until technology replaced the village witch throwing stones and chicken bones in the dirt and trading divination for your prized cow.

How many social rituals were built upon the idea of finding your soulmate?  Handshakes, kisses on the cheek, hell most cultures had adapted some greeting that allowed for touch. Just in case.   He'd been accused of everything from snobbery to germaphobia for his refusal to touch people, even to take things from them, but he had long ago tired of a polite ritual that left him unable to stop hoping all the while knowing each touch was going to end in disappointment.

Now it was all online, sophisticated search programs, registries, trans-national immigration agreements, the whole world seeming to have embraced the idea once science gave them permission to believe what everyone wanted to believe all along. That there was someone out there for you, your match, your mate, the one who would complete you, chosen by the universe.

Whether you called it God or nature or science, it was the one thing that outstripped human control, defied all attempts to replicate or quantify. A divine compact with a dark, empty world and the finite sureness of time.   Raised up from dust and returned to it, but each person got this one thing, this absolute, a promise, almost in recompense. It was comforting, he supposed. However cruel life may be, there was the chance, the possibility, however remote, of perfect happiness.  Maybe it was needed now more than ever, as fractured and disconnected as we were. As alone. In so many ways, more alone now than we had ever been. It was no surprise the idea had grown to almost cult-like status over the centuries.

So, he might have spent some time researching all this.

A footnote. In a journal article from the sixties. Not even a peer-reviewed journal, just something that aspired to it. That was all he had been able to find. Doctor Simon Brewster, PhD, speculated that there could be an occurrence when a mate dies in utero, before the mark forms in whatever part of the DNA controls it, but after the bond develops, though Doctor Brewster carefully noted that he could find no record of such a thing actually happening. Maybe no one wanted to know about it. Why would you? It wasn’t something that could be cured. There were no colored ribbons, no fundraisers, no pink vacuums or catchy bumper stickers. What would be the point?

There were records though, if you knew what to look for and where to look for it. You had to read between the lines. Mingi, the cursed children who brought bad luck to some tribes in Ethiopia. The lost ones, they were called by some of the indigenous Pacific Islanders. Changelings in Irish folk tales. Filipino stories told of Aswangs, who sicken and die quickly. Around the world, cultures seemed to have some lore about it, these children who were born wrong. It probably didn’t happen all that often, but it must have happened enough to scare people, to make them create these explanations for something they couldn’t control and couldn’t understand. To give them an excuse for why these children were shunned, hated even. Worse, sometimes.

Tony reached for the bottle and held it up in front of him, swirling the remaining contents around in the bottom before bringing it to his mouth and swallowing the rest, squeezing his eyes shut as they watered where it burned a path down his thorat. He was thrilled for Pepper and Happy.  

Really. Just thrilled.

_“How did you—“ Tony started, then stopped and cleared his throat where his mouth had gone dry. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his suit, staring out through the French doors over the garden where the guests were starting to fill the rows of white chairs. “How did you know?”_

_“Tony,” she said from behind him. He was making her sad. It was her wedding day, and he was upsetting her. He could see her reflection in the glass panes, a white silhouette clutching a colorful spray of some kind of flowers. His mother would have known their names, he thought out of nowhere. “Don’t do this to yourself.”_

_“Just—just tell me,” he heard himself say. He could feel his jaw tightening like a vice, but couldn’t make himself stop. He needed to hear it. Wanted to hear it with a manic sort of desperation, even though he knew, God-damn it all to hell, he knew that he shouldn’t be doing this. Not now. Probably not ever. It was her day, and he was—fuck, he didn’t know what he was doing, except that he was about to walk the closest thing he’d had to a chance down the aisle, and he needed to hear it. He could hear it from her. Maybe only from her. He had always wanted her happiness more than his own. He wasn’t sure why he had to know, except that he’d walked out of a cave into something more, and this should be enough, but it wasn’t, and he didn’t know why. It was more than most would ever have, and it was so close to enough that if he could just hear it, just know, maybe it could be enough._

_She didn’t answer right away, as if giving him time to rethink it, to take it back. He should, he knew, but he couldn’t. It was sitting out there now, in the space between them, but it had been there long before this, he could see that now. She hadn’t known it, of course, and he hadn’t realized, but the question had always been between them, an invisible wall, and he’d been looking through it the whole time, distorting everything like one of those funhouse mirrors. The kind you might see at a circus._

_“I—I just knew,” she finally began, her words coming out quickly, like it would be better if she could peel the bandage off before the pain could register. “When I touched him. I mean, we’d talked before. I’d seen him around SI, of course, and I always liked Happy, but…he took my briefcase that day as I was getting into the car, and we just—touched,” Pepper explained, an odd combination of happiness overlaid with sorrow in her voice. “I just knew. Everything was—it was more right than it had been the second before. I’m probably not—I don’t know how to say it.   It was,” she continued with a small sigh. He could see her shoulders slump a bit in the paned reflection, but the way she looked, her eyes gone distant and soft at the memory, her right hand wrapping a circle around her left wrist as if she could feel the mark there, it was enough to answer his question, he supposed. “It was like a burden that I didn’t know I was carrying was taken from me in a single heartbeat.   Everything was completely clear. This person would love me exactly as I am, no matter how I change or what happens to us---I can be entirely me, and this person—he will love me. Tony, it was—it was freedom. It was being utterly and completely free, because I will be loved, no matter what. That’s…that’s what it felt like.”_

That was the thing. Everyone had someone. Maybe you didn’t find that person, but they were out there. No matter who you were or what you did, there was someone who would love you.   Sure, it didn’t mean eternal bliss, even if you found that person. Real life wasn’t a fucking storybook, and bad things happened to good people, and people were still selfish and cruel. Finding your soulmate wasn’t a cure for the human condition.

But it meant—well. Having a soulmark meant you were someone who could be loved. You had that. And as it turned out, just knowing that meant something to people. Maybe you wouldn’t be happy. There were no guarantees. But, everyone had the chance, and that mattered a whole fucking lot to people. Hell, murderers had soulmarks. Hilter, Stalin…Trump. They all had marks.

Everyone. Everyone had the chance to be loved, completely and inexorably, without pretense or fear. To be free.

Right. Ain’t life grand? Oh, maybe there were others like him, but they sure as hell didn’t talk about it. Not exactly a twelve-step program or Facebook group. Who the fuck in their right mind would admit this?

Tony sat the bottle back on the bar with a loud thump, the sound echoing through the darkened room too loudly in the quiet. You needed quiet for this, he thought. Noise somehow made this whole thing all the more pathetic. He’d mentally agreed when he placed Pepper’s hand in Happy’s, the two of them beaming at each other, to give himself this night, one night. Hell, not even—fuck, what time was it? Not even a night. A few hours. Then he would go back to reminding himself that he was Tony Stark and none of this had ever mattered. It hadn’t stopped him from getting out of that cave, and it hadn’t stopped him from becoming Iron Man.

He couldn’t let this matter.

But, he could have a night. He could give himself that.

Tony walked over and sat down heavily on the crackled leather sofa. He bent over and reached across the sofa for the tablet, swiping it on, then rubbing a hand over his eyes at the glow and letting his head lean back against the cushion pillowing his neck. He finally looked back at the screen, idly thumbing through the company emails, most of which he would ignore.

He checked his personal email, finding one from Pepper, too casual to be anything other than her checking up on him. “Jarvis, send the Potts-Hogan suite at the St. Regis something that says ‘Tony is eating and sleeping appropriately and completely not engaging in self-destructive behavior,’” Tony called out.

“The usual fruit basket and shoes then,” JARVIS responded.

“Sounds good,” Tony mumbled. There was one other email in his inbox, this one from an unknown sender with a large document attached. “J, scan this other email for me, would you?”

“I’m not detecting any viruses, Sir.   I am also unable to determine the sender without more analysis. The attachment appears to be some type of scientific report by a Doctor Erik Selvig,” JARVIS supplied after a moment.

“Huh. Well, let’s see what the good doctor has to say,” Tony muttered, opening the attachment. Thermonuclear astrophysics? Bit hefty for late night reading, but at least somewhat interesting, he mused. He managed to make it as far as quantum tunneling effect before switching off the tablet, blinking as his eyes tried to adjust to the sudden darkness. He reached up and jerked off his bowtie, undoing the buttons of his dress shirt and untucking it from his waist before pushing himself up and shrugging it off, letting it fall to the floor. He toed off his shoes, then kicked off his pants, padding to the bed in his boxers and socks.

He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, staring at the ceiling until the big dark blob dancing in front of his eyes coalesced into bits and pieces he could pick out in the dim, blue glow of the reactor. He never should have asked Pepper to tell him that.

You can’t miss what you never had, he’d spent years assuring himself. It was the uncertainty, the damn, fucking unknown, that drove you crazy. He’d built it up in his head because it was the one thing he couldn’t have. It was the not knowing that was worse. Wasn’t that what everyone said? Better to know you had cancer than wonder if you did. At least he knew. He had that. He fucking _knew_. He had all the certainty in the world. No one would look at him the way Happy looked at Pepper, no one was sitting out there wondering about him, hoping for him.

No one was waiting for him.

Certainty was supposed to be comforting. He’d just lay here and wait for the comfort to arrive. Any minute now, he thought with a bitter huff of a laugh.

He was well aware that he needed to stop this. One night of being a maudlin ass could quickly turn into a week-long bender if he wasn’t careful. Wouldn’t be the first time. Fuck it all, you didn’t need a damn soulmate to be happy. That had always been true. He thought maybe you needed to know you had a chance to find one though. That maybe just the certainty that you could be loved, maybe that would be enough. But, he didn’t know if that was true or not. He would never know if that was true. And there’s the fucking uncertainty, he thought, feeling the tension leak out of him as he gave in. He’d known he was going to end up here tonight. There had never really been any other way this night ended, pathetic though it might be.   He knew himself too well at this point.

“Jarvis,” he said heavily, voice thick and slurry with lost sleep and too much alcohol.

“Of course, Sir. One moment,” JARVIS responded softly, a hint of something like acceptance in his voice.

Tony blinked at the sudden brightness, though the sharp, staccato sounds were oddly comforting, familiar enough by this point, he supposed. He rolled over to his side, watching the grainy black and white projection play on the bedroom wall. Maybe you never outgrew the comforts of childhood, though it might be less embarrassing to carry around a patched-up lovey of some kind instead of this.   On the screen, Cap was waving a hand over his shoulder to signal the Commandos forward into battle. Tony could feel his limbs going heavy and soft, eyes pricking as exhaustion overtook him as he watched Cap’s image flicker across the wall.

Something about these old reels had always been soothing.


	2. Chapter 2

He should know by now to leave well enough alone.

There had probably never been an answer that would have satisfied him in any meaningful way, and Tony knew those were just the kinds of questions that didn’t need asking, but it had been sitting there between them for so long, almost as if it had carved out its own space that he could no longer cross. It was there in the occasional vacant stare, the words not said when the pause was just long enough to hear the echo of them, the way Steve would sometimes rub at the simple leather band around his wrist and for a moment, Tony could see a flicker of something that terrified him cross Steve’s face before it was carefully masked.

There was a certain safety in being jealous of ghosts, Tony supposed. It was cruel, perhaps, the kind of thing you thought, but would never say out loud, as if speaking it made it worse, somehow more true for the saying of it than just thinking it. Almost from the beginning, it had been there, though, in the back of his mind, slithering itself around his thoughts and telling him it didn’t matter, not now. Whoever it had been, they were relegated to the unreachable province of Steve’s past, unable to intrude on what was left for Tony.

Loving Steve was safe, that was the thing. It always had been, a cocoon from the world since he was a child flipping through comics and telling himself that it was okay if his parents couldn’t love him completely because Captain America could do anything, after all, even that. That had been enough for a child to cling to, certainty giving way to resentfulness only as the march of time left him little choice in the matter. The comics were packed away, the posters carefully rolled and stored, the movie reels…well. If those still needed to stand between him and other, far more terrible choices, then he was going to occasionally allow himself that much.

Then he’d actually met Steve, which had gone spectacularly poorly. Not as if there had been any kind of unrealistic expectations in play, Tony thought dully. It had hurt, he couldn’t deny that, unfair though that may have been to Steve. It had been like every disappointment left festering for years was scraped out of him, leaving him hollow and empty. He’d poured them onto Steve, of course he had, damn Loki and his magic stick.

But then, New York happened, and they’d fought together, nearly died together, and it had been Steve’s smiling face he’d woken up to, bright as the sun and just as blinding to look at. They’d parted ways as, well, not friends, exactly, but not strangers. A quick handshake goodbye, and Steve had been gone, but that hollow, empty feeling had disappeared as well, swept away with brick and mortar and dust and all the other things that didn’t really matter in the end.

That could have been the end of it, maybe, he mused, except that Steve had shown up at the Tower a few days later, sheepishly admitting his Shield-provided apartment was rubble and wondering if he could stay for a few nights, which turned into weeks and then months and then turned into something else entirely.

It had always been easy to love Steve, but he’d never realized, couldn’t conceive of really, how easy it was to be _in_ love with Steve. It was the first breath in after you break the surface of the water, everything you need at once and so simple to do, Tony didn’t even need to think about it. It just…was, every minute of every day. How do you tell yourself to stop breathing? You can’t. It has to be forced out of you, and maybe that was what he was trying to do, just slowly, taking in as much air as he could before he went under.

Some ghosts don’t stay buried. What was it he’d heard some New Age guru bullshitting on about her new book of soulmate secrets…the universe fights to bring two souls together. God, nature, destiny, science, call it what you will, but it struggles against our own free will to try to bring you together, gives you marks to help identify each other, sends a surge of endorphins when you do, so you’ll know. How many ways do you need to be told that it yearns for completeness just as people do?

Comforting thought, at least for everyone still searching, still hoping. Not such a balm when it rearranges the rules of time to bring two people together who probably never should’ve been torn apart in the first place.

He should’ve just kept his fucking mouth shut instead of blurting it out like that, though, enjoyed what he’d been given for however long he got to have this and shut the hell up about it. But the question had been gnawing its way through everything between them, tainting each touch, each word, as it dug out more and more space for itself. Doubt becomes distance, a self-fulfilling cycle that Tony couldn’t seem to stop no matter how many times he told himself not to hang on this tightly to someone who wasn’t his.

But fuck it all, it had been an odd way for Steve to answer, that was the thing, Tony thought hours later as he stared at the blue schematic hovering in front of him. Granted, he’d probably caught Steve a bit off guard, considering Steve had still been spending himself inside Tony at the time, hips jerking with the last few erratic thrusts. He had terrible timing, but that was probably the only time he could have managed to get the words out, in the dark like that, the walls they both threw up around them crumbled enough for the other to scale, Steve buried so deep inside him he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began, when Steve was the most his.

Still. It had been a strange reply, though the oddity of it hadn’t fully settled into his sex-clouded brain until this morning. He’d heard one thing last night, a bright thrum of words threading though his body bringing release as his body quaked against Steve’s.

_“He has one,” Steve said, voice a bit hoarse and strained, as he rolled to the side, wrapping Tony in his too-big arms and tugging him to a sweat-slickened chest that was still heaving. “But it's not me.”_

He couldn’t ask Steve to clarify, not yet, anyway. Steve was off on his latest Hunt for Red October, though when Tony had woken to a cold bed this morning, it had lacked the usual ominous feeling that it might be something he needed to get himself used to.     He waved a hand at the image hovering in front of him and dragged it to the virtual trashcan, giving up on getting any actual work done today.

He has one. He has one. Like that was something to point out. He has one. Of course, Barnes has one. Everyone has one. That’s the point. That’s always been the whole fucking point of it. He has one. He was reading way too much into three words. Hell, they weren’t even the usual three words you read too much into.

Tony ran a hand through his hair and pushed his chair away from the worktable. He grabbed his coffee mug and made his way out of his workshop to the Tower’s elevator, hitting the button that would take him to Bruce’s floor. By the time the doors slid open, he had almost convinced himself he was on his own snipe hunt, but he wasn’t going to get any work done, that much was obvious, and if anyone knew more about this stuff, it was Bruce.

Bruce was bent over a microscope, squinting through wire-rimmed glasses at whatever boring cultures were on the slide. He looked up with surprise when Tony appeared, though he covered it quickly enough with a welcoming smile. “Hey there,” Bruce called out with a small, stilted wave. “No…no, ah, assembling,” Bruce said with a nod to the alarm. “What brings you down here to troll the dregs of actual scientific research?”

“Just checking in on things. We never talk anymore, Jolly Green. Why is that?” Tony muttered, picking up and putting down whatever his hands could grab from Bruce’s workstation. Bottles, petri dishes, God, was that blood, he wondered as he held a test tube with a thick, red substance in it up to his face and rocked it back and forth, watching the way it clung to the sides in small waves, like one of those pens with the floating scene inside it.

“Uh, because you hate all this biological stuff, and I’m not Steve?” Bruce offered with a slight tug at one corner of his mouth. “He’s been gone all of a few hours. Not even you can be this bored yet.”

“That’s ridiculous. Such aspersions upon my character. I’m hurt, Brucie-bear,” Tony muttered, frowning at the test tube as he placed it back in the rack. “Maybe I just wanted to chat, the two of us. Science-y science type things.”

“Really? And what is it you came down here to discuss?” Bruce asked.

Tony swallowed and felt his mouth twist.   “Nothing. Just checking in. You know. On your—“ he waved his hand in the air. “Science stuff.”

“You have literally zero idea what I’m working on,” Bruce replied lightly. “Come on, Tony. Give over. You’ve been acting off for the past few…ah. Okay, I see it now.”

“See what? You see nothing. Nothing to see. I should probably go, though,” Tony said, already stepping back.

“You know that I’m probably the last person to talk about this stuff with, right? I mean, me and Betty…we’re not exactly the model of a successful relationship,” Bruce admitted, his voice going careful and heavy for a moment. Bruce didn’t talk about Betty very often, Tony knew. He’d never asked if they were soulmates. Whatever they were, Bruce loved her enough to walk away, and it didn’t take a lot of digging to see where the anger he was able to sustain came from, not now, anyway, when Tony had spent the past few months nursing his own hatred for a world that would try to tear this from him.

“It’s not Barnes. At least, not so much Barnes—it’s…” Tony started, then stopped and used the pause to clear his suddenly dry throat, the familiar admonition not to say anything a drumbeat in his head.   “How much do you know about soulmarks?”

“How long have you got?   Spent some time on the fringes in India with a few researchers doing work on it. Too controversial for funding here, trying to find the science behind it, figure out how it works. They’re doing a lot of research now that they’ve mapped the genome. It’s fascinating, really,” Bruce told him, eyes bright and words flowing rapidly, the way they did when he got excited about something. “Imagine if you could understand how it all works. I mean…wow, right?”

“Yeah, wow,” Tony mumbled, hands fidgeting too much, so he shoved them in his pockets.

“Come on, Tony! Think of it! You’re talking about the most powerful force on Earth,” Bruce reminded him. “It starts and ends wars, it makes people do the most extraordinary things, the most terrible things…the worst of ourselves and the highest expression of humanity, all in one. To be able to understand that…but, okay, sure, I can wax poetic about the science of that kind of love all day long…why are we talking about this? Didn’t think this was really your kind of thing.”

“Just, you know. Curious,” Tony replied with a quick look at Bruce, who was frowning down at the clipboard he was holding. Ah, fuck it, just ask, Tony admonished himself bitterly. He reached out to run a hand over the row of test tubes, making them clink together in the silent lab. “Did, ah. Was there anything in—in Erkisne’s notes on Rebirth about it? How the ah, how the serum might, you know. Affect…things.”

Bruce studied him for a long moment, something sad, almost barren passing over his face, and Tony knew the answer before he spoke it. “No,” Bruce replied. “Nothing in what few notes survived,” Bruce said carefully. Tony had known that, of course. He’d spent weeks scouring everything he could get on Project Rebirth. But, if he’d missed something, anything, then Bruce…Bruce would have found it. Tony sucked in a breath, and it went in too cold and too much and he found himself coughing, trying to make his body respond right again, like it had forgotten how to breathe.

“I thought that was odd, actually,” Bruce continued. “Erskine went out of his way to think through everything, so it was odd, you know? Not to have anything in there about how this might affect the Bond. So, I talked to a few people. Went back to Germany, even. Did a bit of digging there.”

“You—did you find anything?” Tony heard himself ask, almost unable to recognize his own voice, the plea in it.

“Not anything of Erskine’s. Not exactly, anyway,” Bruce amended, eyes watching Tony and seeing entirely too much, too clearly. I should go, Tony thought, the need to flee before Bruce said whatever it was he was holding back, and it was clear he was holding something close, a hidden card he didn’t want to put on the table. Tony didn’t want to see it, wanted to keep playing the game for as long as he could, but he was rooted to the spot, a mild buzzing filling his ears that he recognized as panic.

“There was something,” Bruce went on, careful, like he was choosing each word. “A couple of sentences in a letter some Nazi research assistant assigned to Schmidt wrote, reporting back to one of Hitler’s underlings in the science division about what Schmidt was up to. Mentioned Erskine was concerned about the possible effects of the serum on the Bond. I mean, the serum, it enhances everything, right? Whatever is inside you already, it makes it…more. Apparently, Erskine’s all worried that the Bond, it’s going to get stronger, too, right? And that…I mean, a Bond already makes people do some seriously insane shit. So Erskine, he’s over there, watching what’s happening, and getting a little concerned about creating a supersoldier that has some soulmate out there, and now this Bond, it’s going to be that much stronger…” Bruce finished, shaking his head slowly, almost apologetically.

“That’s it? That’s all?” Tony demanded, too loudly, each word breaking off like the snap of a tree limb.

“Like I said, it was just a couple of sentences. Not much to go on, I know,” Bruce replied with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “Tony,” he began, then shut his mouth and wiped a hand over the grimace that was forming. “What’s this about? Really? Is something up with Steve?”

“What? No,” Tony answered absently. His mind was whirring around something, a shadow in a dark corner that he could just barely see, but it was there. “Maybe,” he amended. “I don’t know—I thought—okay, look, I thought maybe Barnes, you know? Steve’s all,” Tony continued, throwing his hands in the air, which hopefully communicated to Bruce whatever it was Steve was about Barnes, because Tony sure as hell didn’t know. “About him.”

“Uh-huh,” Bruce said noncommittally, but he was watching Tony with a sharp, keen gaze.

“Look, forget it. Just—just forget I asked, okay? I’ve got—my lab. Things to do,” Tony rushed out, turning to go, forcing himself to modulate his steps to the elevator. Not too fast, not too slow, God it was fucking hard to find the right rhythm when he wanted to run.

“Tony, does Steve have a mark?” Bruce asked the question softly, like it didn’t want to be asked. “That would’ve been my go-to. If I were Erskine, I mean. Someone who can’t Bond…you don’t have to worry about the effects of the serum. He’d already seen what it could do if he picked the wrong kind of person. Love and hate, they’re not opposites. Believe me. Whatever went wrong with Schmidt, maybe he thinks,” Bruce went on, hands clenching and unclenching around his clipboard, and Tony wondered what it was like to have to carry your anger as a sword and a shield, but never being able to lay either down. “Maybe he thinks he needs to avoid the risk. Tens of thousands of young men enlisting, and Erskine picks Steve…I mean, sure, he’s a great guy, but come on. Erskine picked him for a reason. Something he wasn’t telling Phillips and the rest of them, but he tapped Steve to be the one from the moment he met him at that recruitment center. What made Steve so special? Maybe it wasn’t something he had. Maybe it was something he was missing.”

Tony turned and stared at Bruce, letting Bruce’s words wash over him, trying to catch them and take them in before his mind found some way to deny the implications, to deny _him_ what they might mean. Tony opened his mouth to say something, though he couldn’t for the life of him think of what. His mind was racing over memories of touches and conversations and had there been anything, anything at all that would even suggest this…this crazy idea. It was insane, right? It was. It was—except.

 _He has one_.

“Steve hasn’t said anything to you?” Bruce asked, voice tight. Tony slowly shook his head in reply, but couldn’t seem to get any actual words out. His mind was too busy having some sort of epiphany/panic attack for something as mundane as words. “Don’t—don’t tell him I said anything, okay? I mean, Tony, I’m just spitballing here. You know you don’t have to be someone’s soulmate to love them, and Steve definitely loves you, no doubt about that. There is nothing, zero, in Steve’s file to even suggest such a thing, and it’s like a one in a, I don’t know, hundred million or something, so it’s extremely unlikely to be that, and if he hasn’t said anything—“

“I don’t have one,” Tony said with an eerie sort of calm he didn’t feel.

“—then you shouldn’t bring it—Wh--What?” Bruce stammered. “What?”

“A mark,” Tony clarified, as if it needed it. “I don’t have one.”

“That’s…” Bruce cut himself off, a deep frown pocketing his features as he returned Tony’s steady gaze. “That’s…interesting. That’s really…that’s _really_ interesting. Tony—do you—I mean if Steve doesn’t, and you don’t—this, I don’t even know, the chances of that are astronomical. It’s impossible or it should be. I mean the odds, it—it shouldn’t happen. What--What does it mean?”

“Fuck if I know,” Tony breathed out, running a hand up and down his face as he twisted back and forth on his heels, suddenly too full of some kind of energy that wanted out.

“Did you, when you first touched, did you feel something? Like, a sort of surge…people describe as different things, but usually some kind of certainty, like the last piece of a puzzle slotting into place or feeling complete, I don’t know,” Bruce stuttered, and Tony realized that Bruce truly didn’t know, and he felt a pang of something like pity in his gut. He had Steve. His ledger was so fucking unbalanced it wasn’t even funny, he realized. Steve would chide him for thinking that, would tell him what a good man he was, that the sins of the past were mistakes not failings, that he tried harder than anyone Steve had ever known, and Tony would listen and almost believe and selfishly swear fealty to whatever force took Steve from his world and brought him to Tony.

 _I wish you could see you like I do_.

How did Steve see him? He couldn’t see Steve without looking through his own lens, how Steve made him feel, the way Steve made him want to be better, made him believe he could be because he knew if he wasn’t, Steve would love him, not despite it, but because he tried. After all, Steve was Captain America, and he had always known that Cap would love him—his thoughts stuttered to an abrupt halt as his mind whiplashed out to catch the thought that had been there for so long, a constant he had taken for a child’s fantasy.

He had always known that Steve would love him as he was.

He had known it when he was boy, paging through the faded issues of propaganda comics. He had known it when he papered his walls with images of Captain America and called it a sanctuary. He had known it when he watched those old movie reels and let them comfort him, soothe his pain and make him feel worthy, even if just for a little while.

He hadn’t needed a bolt of awareness because it had always been there, a long-held truth that he was just now hearing, whether because of some serum-enhanced Bond or because his heart had always trusted what his mind couldn't believe, that someone like Steve would love him, completely and fully.

“Do you believe the universe fights for souls to be together?” Tony asked, trying to keep his voice steady and tell himself the answer wasn’t everything.

“I don’t know. I didn’t, not like this. But, this…I mean, God. Just--what if…”Bruce started. “Bear with me here, but…if you were meant to be together, all of this with Steve and the serum and the ice…maybe…maybe the Bond formed, but you weren’t born yet, so there’s no mark to give Steve, and since he doesn’t have one, you can’t, so…I don’t—I mean, it’s _possible_ …we just don’t know a lot about how these things work, but…the chances, I just can’t believe…I mean, this can’t be random, Tony. There’s always been so much about the Bond we don’t understand. There’s no way to be sure, of course, but, God, what if…” he repeated, giving his head a good shake to clear it. “God, Tony. What if? _What if_?”

He should be beyond happy. Ecstatic. Thrilled. But there was a hollow sort of emptiness settling in his chest, because he’d been given Steve his whole life and not seen it, but Steve never had anyone and never believed he would. He’d signed up to be Erskine’s lab rat and knew when he did it that part of the thing that qualified him was that he was the kind of alone that Tony never truly had been. Steve had loved Peggy and sent the Valkyrie into the icy Arctic waters knowing she would have another chance at happiness.  Had Howard known?  was that what drove him to keep searching? 

What if, indeed.   Life wasn’t meant to be lived as a question, shrouded in uncertainty and the unknowable.   We are meant to know we are capable of being loved. That is the gift the universe gives us, and he had known that his whole life, only doubting it when it was actually presented to him.

Tony looked down at the titanium band around his left wrist and felt a blinding surge of hatred for the damn thing. Steve loved him, truly loved him, and nothing was going to take that away. If the universe wouldn’t fight for this, for them, he damn sure would.

He looked back up at Bruce, who was clearly alternating between wanting to be anywhere else and ask a hundred different questions. “It doesn’t matter,” Tony heard himself say, the words sitting warm and fluid in his chest. It was true. It didn’t matter. He had been searching for something he’d already found, and almost lost it in the looking.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tony said again, more sure this time, more sure than he’d been in a long time.

“No,” Bruce said after a moment, worrying a bit at his bottom lip with his teeth. “No, I guess it really doesn’t.”

When Tony got back to the penthouse, there was already a message from Jarvis, letting him know the Quin-Jet was on its way back, sans one ex-Rooskie. Tony sat down on the couch and let his head fall back against the curve of the back. He steepled his hands over his face and breathed out, then let them fall to his lap. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest like each beat was bouncing off the reactor, clanging through his ears, but his hands were steady as he popped the lock on the metal band around his wrist and slid it off. He set it on the glass coffee table in front of him and ran a thumb over the lighter circle of skin there, just over the spiderweb of blue veins pulsing underneath.

He’d spent his life looking at this as something that was missing, something that was wrong, but would he have found Steve if he’d been like everyone else? Would he have even seen what he had? If the mark was a map to your happiness, then it had led him to that end. Maybe that’s what all the mark really was, a promise of what could be, the knowledge that each of us, terrible, broken things that we are, can be loved by another. If so, that promise had been fulfilled many times over, Tony thought, watching the way the metal band gleamed in the fading light of the afternoon sun that was streaming in the windows. He loved Steve more than he would have thought possible, and he knew Steve loved him the same way, as hard as that was to understand sometimes.

It doesn’t matter, Tony thought, letting the thought settle over him, feeling it leech throw his skin and soak into his bones. Soulmate or no, it doesn’t matter. He looked up at the door, waiting for Steve to walk in. He would show him, hold up his wrist and tell Steve it didn’t matter, and maybe Steve would show him his and it would be blank or maybe it wouldn’t, but it didn’t matter, because this, this thing between them, it couldn’t be measured against anything and come away the lesser, of that Tony was certain.

Maybe the universe fights for souls to be together or maybe it really is all random vagaries of fate. Whatever it was, it brought Steve to him and showed him what it felt like to be the kind of person that someone like that would love, wholly and completely and without reservation, and that was all anyone could ever hope for, the answer to the question, the gift the universe promised to each of them. Steve loved him, and he loved Steve, both of them with the same fierce certainty as if they truly were soulmates. If fate was a series of choices, then he’d made his long ago. This was what mattered, this knowledge, this certainty, this absolute conviction. The rest of it didn’t matter.

He stared at the door, willing it to open.  He wasn't sure how long his pissing contest with time went on, but Steve finally poked his head in, looking tired and worn, but smiled wanly in greeting.  Tony rose from the sofa and smiled back, walking over to where Steve was setting down the shield and removing his gloves.  He turned when Tony approached, and reached out to pull him close, holding Tony tight against his chest.  Tony felt the faint brush of lips across the top of his head, and let himself relax into the embrace, breathing in the warm air that clouded between them, and for the first time in memory, felt utterly free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiraeth is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was.


	3. Fanart by superfizz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I commissioned the immensely talented superfizz for this artwork to go with the fic. Check out their tumblr for more beautiful works and information about commissions. superfizz.tumblr.com.

[](https://www.cweb-pix.com/image/LHGD)

[](https://www.cweb-pix.com/image/LHGF)


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